Top 3 Signs Your Sales Prospect Is Not the Right Fit

When it comes to pursuing sales leads, it’s all about quality over quantity these days – especially with the rise of account-based sales and marketing. Finding the right accounts for your business starts with smart and effective sales prospecting. Most successful B2B sales leaders will tell you that the amount of leads you have in the funnel matters less than the quality of the leads you’re contacting. If they aren’t the right fit, they won’t convert into closed deals or create any revenue.

Following the wrong sales targets means that you’ll be spending wasted time on sales research, phone calls, emails and follow up – time that could be spent on targets that are actually looking for a product like yours. That’s why spending more time qualifying your leads is a much better use of your time and budget. But how do you know which leads are the right ones?

Here are some signs your sales prospect is not the right fit:

1. No Business Value

You can dazzle during calls and meetings all day, but if the prospect isn’t in a position to purchase your product or service, then you aren’t doing yourself any favors. Working with decision makers from the beginning to better understand how you present business value tends to remove a lot of uncertainty in lead qualification. Having the right sales intel around those decision makers and their roles within the company can also make a huge difference in qualifying leads.

A sales platform like EverString does the grunt work of lead qualification for you. By using continuously updated sales data within its platform, your team always knows they are only reaching out to the best accounts and contacts from the get-go. This frees up valuable resources for actually working toward a meaningful sale instead of wasting time talking to the wrong companies.

2. Wrong Size and Demographics

Understanding your ideal customer profile before sales prospecting is also crucially important, especially if you are in a high-growth company trying to nail down a go-to-market strategy. Part of crafting an ICP is knowing you are going after companies with the right employee size, geographic region, industry and demographics. However, to be even more targeted, you might also need more advanced sales data like firmographics and technographics.

Disqualifying the wrong sales leads at the beginning can help you be laser-focused in your approach, and it removes guesswork. There are several signs of disqualification when you’re identifying potential prospects:

Company size and/or revenue is much bigger or smaller compared to your typical customers

The prospect is in a time zone or country that your product or service can’t support

The industry or vertical market does not fit or operate in your space

With an predictive sales solution like EverString, you can create an audience model in minutes – not weeks or months – and then compare any company against that audience model with powerful lead scoring capabilities. EverString Audience Platform lets users filter by company size, demographics and firmographics so they can make sure they’re targeting only the accounts that are best suited to a particular product or service.

3. They’re Unengaged

Dealing with leads is kind of like dating – if you’re not getting receptive signals, it’s probably not going to work out. It would be great if all leads opened all of your emails and responded positively to your messaging every time. However, if your persistence and persuasiveness is not paying off and your multi-thread approach isn’t working, it might be time to let that prospect go. Here are a few signs that your prospects might be unengaged:

Even after several calls, emails and demos, and reviews of multiple materials, the prospect is still having a difficult time understanding your company’s product or service.

There have been cancelled calls and meetings on multiple occasions.

You’ve reached out to multiple decision makers at the company with little to no response.

The prospect has made conflicting statements about your product or seems disorganized.

You can gauge how receptive prospects are to your content by how and how often they interact with it. Make sure your company is leaning on marketing automation software and analytics to see who is opening your emails, clicking on links, etc., then your marketing team can have a better sense of who to prioritize and engage with. EverString also integrates sales data with leading marketing and sales automation platforms like Marketo, Hubspot and Salesforce to make the target audience process even more seamless for you.

Final Note:
Once leads come from your marketing team or through your own sales research, it’s important to make sure that you’re laser-focused on the best prospects from the bunch. Having a clear sense of your total addressable market can also help you put your resources to the best possible use. EverString uses audience models based on your past sales wins to help you better understand which contacts and accounts are worth pursuing – taking the legwork out of prospecting for you.